Dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1957
With Paths of Glory, Stanley Kubrick indicates, perhaps for the first time, the meticulous control of the cinematic medium that has come to define his oeuvre. Here, executed with an exacting economy of style and unwavering assuredness, we find a director already exploring the themes to be refined and reevaluated throughout his career. Paths of Glory is both an invective against the arrogance and downright silliness that characterize the follies of war and a thoroughgoing critique of a humanism that would whitewash the darker aspects of our nature.
Deserving well a place alongside other Kubrick films like Dr Strangelove and Full Metal Jacket in the canon of antiwar classics, Paths of Glory’s drama centers on the dilemma of World War One French Army Colonel Dax (Kirk Douglas). Dax’s unit is issued glaringly impossible orders to capture an impregnable German redoubt by the calculating and unscrupulous General Mireau (George Macready), who is seeking to impress his superiors with the suicidal assault. Despite his rational compunctions, the Colonel accepts his assignment and the battle ensues.
The film’s central combat sequence benefits from the concrete coldness of George Krause’s black and white cinematography, as it offers a dispassionate portrait of the impersonal momentum of war. What could have easily been rendered with a kind of “Charge of the Light Brigade” sentimentality is instead depicted by the monomaniacal forward motion of Kubrick’s camera as it prowls the trenches that hem it in and as it unflinchingly follows the cusp of the charge across no-man’s-land with an implacable inevitability. The question this scene poses about the distinction between bravery and insanity is there in full in the flashes of animal wildness behind the stony façade of Douglas’ perfect performance.
In the wake of the failed assault, Mireau convenes a kangaroo court, to which three members of Dax’s unit have been arbitrarily summoned to stand trial for the capital offence of “cowardice in the face of the enemy.” The film never doubts the veracity of the three men’s attempt to carry out their orders, it does, however, take a hard look at the mythology of warrior heroics. If Paths of Glory’s battl
e scene obscures the individual humanities that are caught up in war, its court marshal scene magnifies them. Most memorable are Kubrick’s stunning close up interrogations of his actor’s faces. Removed and isolated from their previous roles in the collective actions of combat, the soldiers are not the steely, square-jawed monoliths we might expect; instead, the film gives us bleary-eyed, hangdog individuals. The depth of the composition in these shots, with the grim portraits of broken men presented in vertiginous relief against baroque ornamentation, belies the supposed glory of their marshal sacrifice and realizes the distance between this mythic rational and the opulent materialism on whose behalf war is waged.
Paths of Glory only runs into trouble in its final scene-- a bar room scene, in which French troops cruelly taunt a young, captured German woman until her singing transform their jeers into silent weeping It is a coda that can too easily be mistaken for a facile, unequivocal redemption of humankind. I’d like to explain why I don’t see the film’s ending in this light by way of comparison with perhaps the quintessential antiwar film, Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion. There are uncanny similarities between the scene in question and the scene of the burlesque improvised by the French and English officers occupying a German prisoner of war camp in Grand Illusion. In fact, the similarities are so uncanny and the differences seem so deliberate, that I would be willing to suggest that Kubrick intentionally invites the comparison. In Renoir’s film, one fluid tracking shot encompasses a room filled with men as they sing La Marseillaise, a moment of stunning formal unity that mirrors the unity the soldiers find in the sublimnity of song. On the level of narrative, Paths of Glory works in the same way— through music the soldiers are moved to find a shared dignity common throughout the human experience. However, Kubrick takes a tact opposite to Renoir. Instead of one shot, he cuts and cuts and cuts, so that the entire crowd is rendered in a sequence of shots depicting lone individuals. Thus the vision of human unity that is given an uninterrupted physical reality in Grand Illusion becomes an illusory construct through Kubrick’s montage. What is Kubrick telling us here? I suspect his vision of the world is one that sees human beings as fundamentally isolated creatures and he laments that, in pursuit of a sense of connectedness, we are as apt to be seduced by the belligerence of honor and glory, as we are by the nobler call of beauty and egalitarianism.
With Paths of Glory, Stanley Kubrick indicates, perhaps for the first time, the meticulous control of the cinematic medium that has come to define his oeuvre. Here, executed with an exacting economy of style and unwavering assuredness, we find a director already exploring the themes to be refined and reevaluated throughout his career. Paths of Glory is both an invective against the arrogance and downright silliness that characterize the follies of war and a thoroughgoing critique of a humanism that would whitewash the darker aspects of our nature.
Deserving well a place alongside other Kubrick films like Dr Strangelove and Full Metal Jacket in the canon of antiwar classics, Paths of Glory’s drama centers on the dilemma of World War One French Army Colonel Dax (Kirk Douglas). Dax’s unit is issued glaringly impossible orders to capture an impregnable German redoubt by the calculating and unscrupulous General Mireau (George Macready), who is seeking to impress his superiors with the suicidal assault. Despite his rational compunctions, the Colonel accepts his assignment and the battle ensues.
The film’s central combat sequence benefits from the concrete coldness of George Krause’s black and white cinematography, as it offers a dispassionate portrait of the impersonal momentum of war. What could have easily been rendered with a kind of “Charge of the Light Brigade” sentimentality is instead depicted by the monomaniacal forward motion of Kubrick’s camera as it prowls the trenches that hem it in and as it unflinchingly follows the cusp of the charge across no-man’s-land with an implacable inevitability. The question this scene poses about the distinction between bravery and insanity is there in full in the flashes of animal wildness behind the stony façade of Douglas’ perfect performance.
In the wake of the failed assault, Mireau convenes a kangaroo court, to which three members of Dax’s unit have been arbitrarily summoned to stand trial for the capital offence of “cowardice in the face of the enemy.” The film never doubts the veracity of the three men’s attempt to carry out their orders, it does, however, take a hard look at the mythology of warrior heroics. If Paths of Glory’s battl
e scene obscures the individual humanities that are caught up in war, its court marshal scene magnifies them. Most memorable are Kubrick’s stunning close up interrogations of his actor’s faces. Removed and isolated from their previous roles in the collective actions of combat, the soldiers are not the steely, square-jawed monoliths we might expect; instead, the film gives us bleary-eyed, hangdog individuals. The depth of the composition in these shots, with the grim portraits of broken men presented in vertiginous relief against baroque ornamentation, belies the supposed glory of their marshal sacrifice and realizes the distance between this mythic rational and the opulent materialism on whose behalf war is waged.Paths of Glory only runs into trouble in its final scene-- a bar room scene, in which French troops cruelly taunt a young, captured German woman until her singing transform their jeers into silent weeping It is a coda that can too easily be mistaken for a facile, unequivocal redemption of humankind. I’d like to explain why I don’t see the film’s ending in this light by way of comparison with perhaps the quintessential antiwar film, Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion. There are uncanny similarities between the scene in question and the scene of the burlesque improvised by the French and English officers occupying a German prisoner of war camp in Grand Illusion. In fact, the similarities are so uncanny and the differences seem so deliberate, that I would be willing to suggest that Kubrick intentionally invites the comparison. In Renoir’s film, one fluid tracking shot encompasses a room filled with men as they sing La Marseillaise, a moment of stunning formal unity that mirrors the unity the soldiers find in the sublimnity of song. On the level of narrative, Paths of Glory works in the same way— through music the soldiers are moved to find a shared dignity common throughout the human experience. However, Kubrick takes a tact opposite to Renoir. Instead of one shot, he cuts and cuts and cuts, so that the entire crowd is rendered in a sequence of shots depicting lone individuals. Thus the vision of human unity that is given an uninterrupted physical reality in Grand Illusion becomes an illusory construct through Kubrick’s montage. What is Kubrick telling us here? I suspect his vision of the world is one that sees human beings as fundamentally isolated creatures and he laments that, in pursuit of a sense of connectedness, we are as apt to be seduced by the belligerence of honor and glory, as we are by the nobler call of beauty and egalitarianism.
Made in 1957, Paths of Glory is a prescient work that seems to belong less to the veiling optimism of the 50s than to the rebellious spirit of the 60s. Like Dr Strangelove, it is a film that seems to struggle against its own cynicism, presenting a stark vision of how thing are in the humble hope of illuminating how things could be.
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